


Better to Kneel than to Burn

by earlybloomingparentheses



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Control Issues, Gen, Neither between Hathaway and Lewis, Non-sexual submission (imagined), Self-Reflection, Sexual submission (imagined), autoeroticism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 16:40:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1786057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlybloomingparentheses/pseuds/earlybloomingparentheses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hathaway still remembers what it felt like to be on his knees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better to Kneel than to Burn

**Author's Note:**

> See end notes for more specific warnings.

Hathaway still remembers what it felt like to be on his knees. 

The stiff, scratchy cushions of the kneelers, or else the plain hard wood, leaving indentations in his skin that lingered past the end of the service. Better still, the cold stone of the chapel floor, which seemed to grow harder the longer he knelt—and sometimes he knelt for hours. He liked the discomfort—or not _liked_ , exactly, _liked_ was too tame, too simple, too straightforward; he _appreciated_ the discomfort, he found it necessary and grounding and, paradoxically, comforting. It reminded him of what he was doing: _giving himself up to God._ Relinquishing his power over his life, letting go of his need for control, of the doubts and worries and riotous thoughts that chased themselves around his head, bursting into dizzying sparks and setting his whole body alight. On his knees, Hathaway could subdue them all. He could submit, clean and pure and whole and blank, to a power greater than himself. And the ache in his joints and the tenderness of his skin kept him anchored to the ground—kept him from cartwheeling into the ether, on a tide of existential anxiety and his unruly intellect.

In the end, he appreciated it a little too much. His mentor, an ancient and calm and genuinely wise priest—the one religious man Hathaway still revered, all these years later—noticed it, and chastised him for it gently: _You are too intense, James, in your devotion. To kneel, to fast, to abstain: these are meant as a means to an end, a way to achieve closeness to God. They are not, in and of themselves, virtuous. You are not meant to enjoy them._

He hadn’t understood, at the time. He couldn’t distinguish, then, between submitting to God and submitting for submission’s sake. He didn’t realize that what the priest had said was not that it was possible to be too intensely devoted to God, but that it was possible to be too intense about devotion. 

In the end, of course, he had learned the hard way that blind obedience carried its own dangers. Perhaps if he had been raised in another faith—some lukewarm Protestant denomination, wary of fanaticism and born out of protest, of Theses tacked to a door and the conviction that to be faithful was not to obey but to question, to probe, to speak to God head-on and not with incense and kneelers and Latin chants—Hathaway might have escaped such a terrible lesson. And then again, probably not; he couldn’t blame Catholicism for his own wild blood, his own desire to tame himself, to be tamed, to still his racing mind with the press of skin on hard stone. 

But he had had to leave the Church. He couldn’t stay there, not once he knew the difference between worshiping God and wanting to be on one’s knees.

 

 

 

Seminary seems a lifetime away, but Hathaway has not grown mellower with the years. When, as now, the threads of a case are running through his head, tangled skeins of electricity firing and misfiring and lighting little beacons all along his nervous system, he feels just the same as he did at fourteen, lying on his back in his cramped dormitory bed and arguing aloud with Nietzsche, _blazing_ with huge ideas about truth and God and life. Nobody wanted to hear them, so Hathaway learned to be very still and very silent, and to keep them shut up in his own head. But he burned anyway, every inch of him restless and wanting _out._ He still burns, with different kinds of questions, names and dates and faces of suspects that rocket through his mind as he works in his office past nine p.m., waiting for that blessed moment when the facts finally fall into place. 

And even then, he thinks, there will be no respite, because this is a horrible case, an ugly case, a murdered little girl and finding her killer won’t give Hathaway the peace he so fervently desires. Because once a case like this is over he is alone with questions of _why_ , of how humans become less than human, of whether or not they merely strayed from the fold or if they are all wolves in sheep’s clothing to begin with. 

He sits at his desk, sorting through a suspect’s phone records with the same appearance of calm he reserves for—well, for almost everything. Julie, who is also, commendably, still at the station, slips him a few more pages and he gives her a nod of thanks. 

“Are you…” She hesitates. “Do you need anything else, Sergeant? Coffee, maybe? You’ve been here a long time.” 

Julie doesn’t make a habit of offering people coffee, and Hathaway appreciates the offer all the more for that. But he can’t stop working, can’t stop _thinking_ , and caffeine is the last thing he needs. 

“Thanks, Julie, I’m all right.” 

She shakes her head, grimacing. “I don’t know how you manage. If I were in your shoes I’d be a wreck right now.”

Julie, like the rest of his coworkers, must imagine him the most methodical thinker alive: that his vast brain stretches out like the grid of a well-planned city, that his stonelike visage and economical movements are a precise and reliable manifestation of what is happening inside of him. She has no reason to suspect otherwise. Hathaway watches her go, the dead girl’s mutilated body suddenly flashing across his vision in violent bloody streaks. He catches his breath and scrabbles for a bit of string from his desk, wrapping it around his palm just tight enough to hurt, and allows the feeling of being constrained, being _bound_ , to calm his racing heart. 

“Still here?” 

He turns around. And there, of course, is the one man who _does_ suspect, coming up behind him smelling of takeaway Indian and some vaguely masculine scent, probably deodorant reapplied in the loo earlier that evening. Hathaway hastily unwinds the bit of string, slipping his reddened palm into his pocket. He can’t tell if Lewis notices. Lewis just raises an eyebrow, taking in Hathaway’s desk, the piles of paper stacked high. 

Sometimes Hathaway thinks he should allow his inspector to glimpse more than the involuntary cracks that sometimes break through his façade—that it would help Hathaway, maybe, or just that Lewis deserves to know. But Lewis is such a simple man—not stupid, God no, but _simple_ , ordinary, straightforward, and Hathaway can’t imagine him greeting the revelation that Hathaway likes— _needs_ —to be on his knees with anything other than bewildered worry and, possibly, a faint tinge of wariness, even distaste. 

“Go home,” Lewis says. “You’ve been at this too long. Clear your head. Get some rest.” 

“But, sir—”

“Go home.” His voice is rock-solid now, as it occasionally becomes, brooking no argument whatsoever, and Hathaway understands with a rush of relief that there’s no point in protesting further; that this decision, at least, is out of his control. 

“Yes, sir.” 

He gathers his things and leaves, his inspector’s eyes on him, narrowed in concern but also confusion, as if Lewis knows something is going on that he can’t quite grasp. 

But that’s just the thing: Hathaway knows he really _can’t_ grasp it. Lewis would be bewildered to witness what Hathaway does the next day, for instance, when the case breaks and Zelinsky confesses to the girl’s murder with glittering _triumph_ in his eyes; he doesn’t know, can’t know, that when Hathaway leaves for fifteen minutes in the middle of filling out paperwork, he’s not going for a smoke, but into the men’s bathroom, where he locks the door with shaking hands and sinks down onto the cool tile. He folds his long legs in on themselves and rests his forehead against the chipped paint of the wall. Hathaway _breathes_ , and feels the hard press of the floor bring him back to himself, away from the whirling vortex of horror, all the unanswerable questions clamoring for control over his mind. His muscle memory kicks in, if not the impulse to pray—the feeling of submission, of being subdued—and he relaxes, fraction by fraction. The discomfort of kneeling on the cold tile is simultaneously a punishment for the disobedient chaos of his brain and blood and a release from it. Even without God in the equation, Hathaway still feels as though he is giving himself up to something. As if by being constricted, he is being set free.

 

 

 

And, of course, there is sex. 

No, not _of course_ , there is no _of course_ about it. It’s taken years for Hathaway to come to terms with the fact that being on his knees is not merely a comfort, not merely a coping mechanism, but at times a source of _pleasure_ as well. That his desire for submission spills over into a distinctly non-theological realm with disturbing ease. It was this—the parallel with his church days—that made Hathaway turn away from his desires for so long. Heretical, to connect prayer and sex, submission to God and submission as pleasure; but then Hathaway remembered how his mentor chided him for enjoying abstinence almost as much as most people liked indulging, and he realized that he had been heretical, or at least deeply misguided in his religious practices, all along. He’d given up praying _because_ he liked the feeling of being on his knees in just the wrong way. He’d left the church, left his whole life behind, for that reason—and because of the consequences it incurred—and refusing to follow through on the implications of that decision is merely willful blindness. 

So now, when he feels the urge overtake him—not the maelstrom of doubts and questions that bring him to his knees in other, less enjoyable ways, but the sharp and heady thrum of desire coursing electric through his veins—Hathaway takes himself home and takes himself in hand. 

 _It is better to marry than to burn_ , Paul wrote centuries before; _you need a partner_ , Lewis said earlier that day, in much the same vein. But sex with other people has always been something of a failure for Hathaway, and after several years spent unhappily fumbling with women like Fiona McKendrick and several unmentionably disastrous others, he has reached the realization that his own mind is more than capable of playing out both wild rebellion and intense restraint. Liv Nash at the Botanical Gardens was lovely and smart and funny but Hathaway isn’t really the man who bowed awkwardly to her, like he hadn’t the faintest idea what his body was for, and he doesn’t think of her when he kneels on his bed, pressing his face into the pillow and tucking his knees into his chest. 

He thinks of different, darker things. Fingers tugging at his hair till his scalp burns; hands that push him down, push him into place; ropes around his wrists that he chafes against until the pain pulls his mind away from its incessant spinning and focuses him sharply on the current moment. He imagines someone jerking his head back for a furious kiss, someone who knows exactly what he wants and why, someone to whom he submits fully and willingly and who bites his lip with a ferocity that makes him gasp and moan. Sharp fingernails—sharp teeth—Hathaway has found that, in his mind at least, the sex of the imagined person, or people, doesn’t seem to matter, only that they are mastering him until he can’t remember his own name. 

He strokes furiously but it’s almost as if his body is somewhere else; the real world dissolves and he is being blindfolded, deprived of yet another measure of control, and slapped until he sinks further onto his knees and then there is a hand between his legs and another at his throat, squeezing steadily until he’s gasping for air, and in real life he holds his breath as long as he can, feeling the burn building in his groin, taking tiny breaths when he feels the world growing white and then shutting his mouth again, thinking _you are not allowed to breathe, you cannot move your hands and you cannot see and you are_ helpless _, entirely without control—_

And then he’s shaking and crying out in a hoarse, oxygen-deprived voice and the world goes a bit dizzy for a long intense moment before he collapses on the bed, sweat dampening his sheets and his body growing limp. 

He cleans himself off with trembling hands, once he has recovered somewhat, and drinks a glass of orange juice, and feels utterly calm.

 

 

 

 _You need a partner,_ Lewis said, and Hathaway does still wonder sometimes if that’s true. Perhaps this is because Lewis and Hobson have been smiling at each other more often these days, and they look so very happy and hopeful, and Hathaway wishes at times, with a breathlessness that surprises him, that he could be happy and hopeful, too. And certainly a desire for submission in bed no way precludes happiness or a healthy relationship, Hathaway knows that; but there’s the thorny problem of how Hathaway feels the _rest_ of the time. “Existential flu” is the closest he’s come to expressing aloud just how intensely difficult it can be to inhabit his own mind. The fireworking patterns of his thoughts, the relentless questions that keep him awake at night, the need to wonder and to doubt and to assess and analyze and he _burns_ , still, can’t help but burn. Sex is a temporary respite; so are strings round his fingers, so is kneeling on the bathroom floor. There might be someone out there, somewhere, who would be willing to do those things for him—bend him, twist him, make him kneel—but while that might be often pleasurable and sometimes helpful, it won’t change who he is. Hathaway will always be Hathaway—not _un_ happy, on his better days, but unable to attain simple contentment, to settle into something placid and steady. Lewis isn’t an unhappy man by nature; he fell into loneliness through misfortune and accident. He’ll be happy again, or so Hathaway dearly hopes. But Hathaway isn’t that sort of man; not that sort of man at all. 

Laura Hobson presses the inspector on the arm as she leaves their latest crime scene, quirking a smile that Lewis can’t help but return with unchecked radiance. It takes ten years off his face. Hathaway smiles too, and bows over the victim’s body to hide it. What a strange thing, his job; what a strange thing, to feel the happiness radiating off Lewis and straight into his own chest as he bends over someone who will never feel anything again. Ah, there it is, he thinks with a clench of his heart—the reminder of mortality, sapping slowly away at his moment of pleasure. Too much going on in his brain to allow more than a moment of relief. 

“Coffee,” Lewis mumbles, and Hathaway looks up curiously. His inspector is staring off in Hobson’s direction, brow furrowed. “Dinner? Too much? Lunch, maybe.” 

Hathaway realizes that Lewis is thinking aloud. “Dinner,” he says, suppressing a grin. “Definitely dinner.” 

Lewis looks startled, then sheepish, then gruff—but the gruffness is only to cover up the fact that he’s begun to blush. 

“Back to work, you,” he instructs. “Get another look at those fingernails before they take him away.” 

“Yes, sir,” Hathaway replies. He bends over the body. On his knees again, he realizes, and the thought startles a laugh out of him. 

“Hathaway?” Lewis looks at him as though he’s just sprouted two heads. Hathaway wonders if he really laughs so infrequently as to merit that response. 

“Sorry, sir,” he says, except he isn’t, really, because this is _funny_ —why is it funny?—and Lewis is there looking down at him, and Hathaway is calling him _sir_ , and it’s funny because it’s nothing like anything he’s imagined, he doesn’t _want_ Lewis in that way, not in the least, and he doesn’t worship him, either—but he does respect him, and maybe he even loves him, and the long and short of it is that if Hathaway’s got to be on his knees, this is the right way to do it, this is the right time and place and the right person looking down at him with fond perplexity and a bit of mayonnaise on his tie and possibly, for once in his life, Hathaway is exactly where and who he needs to be. 

“I’m just contemplating the universe from a slightly different angle, sir,” he says serenely. 

“From the floor of a run-down walk-up that smells of cat pee?” Lewis asks, raising his eyebrows. 

“Yes. It’s quite illuminating, sir, you ought to try it.” 

“I’ll leave that to you, I think,” Lewis replies, “both the floor and the contemplation. My back’s not what it used to be, you know.” 

Hathaway fights the urge to laugh again, to laugh until the tears stream down his face, and then he realizes—well, maybe he can let himself go, just this once. 

“You’re a mystery to me, Hathaway,” Lewis says, as Hathaway doubles over with giggles. “An absolute mystery. Come on, let’s get on with it. Can’t go crawling around on the floor all day—what _is_ it, man?” 

“It’s nothing,” Hathaway gasps. “I’m fine. I’ll get up in a minute, I just—I _like_ it down here.” 

There is a moment in which Lewis seems to be deciding whether or not to fear for his sergeant’s sanity, but then he shrugs and grins and gives his head a baffled shake. “All right, lad. All right.” 

And Hathaway, with the pee-smelling carpet under his knees and his inspector standing above him, _is_ all right. He really is.

**Author's Note:**

> Imagined breathplay, imagined light bondage, imagined dom/sub.


End file.
